The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador

What does the bull see as it charges the matador? What does the bull feel? This is an ancient mystery, but it seems like a safe bet that to this bull, Marques—ashy black, 5 years old, 1,100 pounds—the bullfighter is just a moving target, a shadow to catch and penetrate and rip apart. Not a man with a history, not Juan Jose Padilla, the Cyclone of Jerez, 38 years old, father of two, one of Spain’s top matadors, taking on his last bull of the afternoon here at the Feria del Pilar, a hugely anticipated date on the bullfighting calendar.

When Marques comes galloping across the sand at Padilla, the bullfighter also begins to run—not away from the animal but toward its horns. Padilla is luminously scaled in fuchsia and gold, his "suit of lights." He lifts his arms high above his head, like a viper preparing to strike. For fangs, he has two wooden sticks with harpoonlike barbs, two banderillas, old technologies for turning a bull’s confusion into rage. Padilla and Marques are alone in the sandy pit, but a carousel of faces swirls around them. A thousand eyes beat down on Padilla, causing sweat to bead on his neck. Just before Marques can gore him, he jumps up and jabs the sticks into the bull’s furry shoulder. He brings down both sticks at once, an outrageous risk. Then he spins around so that he is facing Marques, running backward on the sand, toe to heel.

A glancing blow from Marques unsteadies Padilla; his feet get tangled. At the apex of his fall, he still has time to right himself, escape the bull. His chin tilts up: There is the wheeling sky, all blue. His last-ever binocular view. This milestone whistles past him, the whole sky flooding through the bracket of the bull’s horns, and now he’s lost it. The sun flickers on and off. My balance—

Padilla has the bad luck, the terrible luck, of landing on his side. And now his luck gets worse.

Marques scoops his head toward Padilla’s face on the sandy floor, a move that resembles canine tenderness, as if he’s leaning down to lick him, but instead the bull drives his sharp left horn through the bullfighter’s jaw. When Marques tusks up, the horn crunches through Padilla’s skin and bone, exiting through his left eye socket. Cameras clock the instant that a glistening orb pops loose onto the matador’s cheek. A frightening silence descends on the crowd. Nobody knows the depth of the wound.

Marques gallops on, and Padilla gets towed for a few feet, pulled by his cheek. He loses a shoe. Skin stretches away from his jawbone with the fragile elasticity of taffy.

Then Padilla’s prone body is left in the bull’s dust. He springs up like a jack-in-the-box and hops around. His face is completely red. As the blood gushes down his cheek, he holds his dislodged eye in place with his pinkie. He thinks he must be dying. I can’t breathe. I can’t see.

Marques, meanwhile, has trotted a little ways down the sand. He stands there panting softly. His four legs are perfectly still. What unfolds is a scene that Beckett and Hemingway and Stephen King might have collaborated to produce, because this is real horror, the blackest gallows humor: the contrast between the bullfighter crying out "Oh, my eye! I can’t see! I can’t see!" and the cud-chewing obliviousness of the animal.

In the bullring, other bullfighters spill onto the sand and rush to Padilla’s aid. They lift him, hustle him toward the infirmary. Meanwhile, the bullfight must go on. Miguel Abellan, another matador on the bill, steps in for Padilla. He kills Marques in a trance-like state that he later swears he can’t remember. Tears run down his cheeks. He’s survived twenty-seven gorings himself, but what he sees in Zaragoza makes him consider quitting the profession.

Cornadas—gorings—are so common that every plaza is legally required to have a surgeon on site. Bullfighters now routinely survive injuries that would have killed their fathers and grandfathers. Good luck, now, excellent luck: Carlos Val-Carreres is the Zaragoza surgeon, one of the best in Spain.

"I’m asphyxiating," Padilla gasps as they bring him in. Many hands guide him into the shadowy infirmary. Someone scissors off his clothing. Someone inserts a breathing tube into his windpipe. Val-Carreres understands instantly that this is a potentially fatal cornada, one of the worst he’s seen in thirty years, and one they are ill-equipped to handle in the infirmary. Padilla, now tracheally intubated, is loaded into an ambulance.

Pronóstico muy grave, Val-Carreres tells reporters.

At 7:52 p.m., half an hour after the goring, Padilla arrives at the emergency room. He presents with multiple fractures to the left side of his face, a detached ear, a protruding eyeball, and hemorrhage at the base of his skull. A five-hour operation saves his life. The surgeons rebuild his cheekbone and eyelid and nose, with mesh and titanium plates. But they are unable to repair his split facial nerve, which has been divided by the bull’s horn, because they cannot locate the base of the nerve. Padilla wakes up from the anesthesia to discover that he can no longer move the left side of his face. It is paralyzed.

When he comes to, his first words to his manager, Diego Robles, are: "Don’t cancel any of my contracts in South America." Padilla has November bullfights in Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador.

His first words to his youngest brother, Jaime, who is also a bullfighter, a banderillero, and scheduled to perform in two days’ time: "Don’t cancel your fight. You have to do it for us. You can’t let this get the best of you."

The matador, now monocular, works a toro in Sanlucarde Barrameda, Spain, on May 19.

"I was there when he saw himself for the first time after the accident," recalls Diego. "He saw the reality in front of him. He said, 'Es que no soy yo—'"

No. That's not me. Here is a vertigo a thousand times more destabilizing than his slip in the plaza: He does not recognize himself.

There is the physical pain, which the doctors reduce with morphine, and then there is the terror. They're telling him he might never again wear his "suit of lights." Never stand before another bull. If he can't return to a plaza, he'll be exiled from his life. Evicted from his own skin.

In his hospital room, as soon as he can move again, he begins to rehearse bullfighting moves with the sheets. And on October 19, less than two weeks after the accident, he gives a press conference in a wheelchair with his face uncovered.

"I have no rancor toward this bull or toward my profession," he slurs into the mike. He makes the following pledge: "I will return to dress as a torero."

···

II. The Wild Feast and the Matador's Famine

A millennium and a half after Moorish cavaliers rode into Spain and began to cultivate the bullfighting tradition, a few hundred years after trendy nobles staged bullfights to celebrate weddings and Catholic festivals, nearly a century since the golden age of the matador, when Juan Belmonte and Joselito "the Little Rooster" pioneered the mad modern style of "artistic" caping (working within inches of the enraged animal), bullfighting remains the national fiesta or the fiesta brava—"the wild feast."

In a standard corrida de toros, the common term for the spectacle, there are three matadors on the bill and six matches total. The fame and fees of twenty-first-century matadors range wildly, depending on official ranking and also "cachet"—a torero's reputation. Group A matadors such as Padilla must perform in at least forty-three corridas per season. These guys are the figuras, and the industry can support only a dozen or so of them. To maintain their status, Group A's need to be frequent fliers and serial killers, traveling fiendishly from February to October, sometimes performing in plazas on opposite coasts in the same week. For Group B matadors, the minimum is thirteen corridas. Group C? No minimums. It's the ladder rung where rookies get classed with semiretired stars. Padilla spent years in Group C before finally breaking through.

Today it's harder than it's ever been to earn a living in the bullring. Unemployment in Spain is nearing 25 percent, and the country's flailing economy is taking its toll on the mundo taurino. ("We will torear la crisis," said Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in a press conference, invoking the figure of the bullfighter to salve Eurozone panic.) Nearly a hundred corridas have been cut from the season, and still plazas are often only half full.

Is bullfighting an art, a sport, torture? Dying out, or more popular than ever? You can find evidence in every direction. Spanish newspapers cover bullfighting in the culture pages, alongside theater reviews. In 2010, Catalonia outlawed corridas de toros; in Madrid they are legally protected as a "cultural good" and publicly subsidized, like the National Ballet. Telemadrid's latest reality show is Quiero Ser Torero—"I Want to Be a Bullfighter."

Bullshit, say Spain's anti-taurinos. "The majority of Spaniards are against the bullfight," says Silvia Barquero, spokeswoman for Spain's animal-rights party, PACMA, who believes the Catalonian ban augurs a new and enlightened era in Spain. "We should not cause suffering to an animal that has the same right to life as our species." (You certainly don't have to be a member of PACMA or PETA to find a corrida alienating, cruel, and atavistic.)

Then there is the controversy over televised corridas. In 2006, when the socialist party was in charge, Spain's national TV network, TVE, stopped showing them. Now, with Rajoy and his conservative Popular Party back in power, the bulls have returned to the public airwaves. On August 24, TVE said that it would again air live bullfights after the six-year hiatus. Previously the network had pulled them from its schedule to protect minors from violence, but superfans could still get the afternoon corridas on premium cable channels. This is how Pepe and Ana Padilla were able to watch their son's goring in the instant it occurred.

Not only could they watch it—thanks to a freakish coincidence, you can now watch them watching it: On October 7, a Canal Sur production crew happened to be taping in the home of Ana and Pepe, filming them seated in front of their son's televised image for a newsmagazine segment titled "The Courage of a Bullfighter." When Marques gored Juan Jose, the glass eye of the camera was trained on Ana Padilla's face.

Should I stop taping? asked the cameraman.

"Siga! Siga!" said Pepe. Keep rolling. If these were Juan's pasos ultimos, his final moments, he wanted a record of them.

The cameraman obliged, and the result is an uncanny hall of mirrors. The nested footage of Ana and Pepe reacting in real time to the goring makes the scene exponentially more horrifying. Suddenly the tiny bullfighter is no remote cartoon of pain but a fully dimensioned human: their son. After Marques spears Padilla, his mother's face erupts in sobs. Pepe doesn't think he will ever recover from his son's accident.

"I thought that I had killed him," he says in a raw voice. "I thought that I had murdered my son. I was the one who encouraged him in this profession...."

Pepe Padilla has raised three toreros. (Oscar, the middle son, retired as a banderillero the day after Juan Jose's goring and now runs a chain of pet-supply stores.) Pepe coached his sons after school, caping cows with them in the green hills around Jerez. He once dreamed of being a matador himself. As a teenager, he was a novillero, a matador in training. "But I was a coward," he says, smiling. "Not like my Juan."

Today, Pepe is a charmer in his sixties with uncorrected teeth, gold jewelry wreathed by silver chest hair, and one droopy eyelid. For decades he worked as a baker in Jerez, sleeping three or four hours, heading back out before dawn to support his seven children. (Seven children! Franco years, he grins, shaking his head. Everything scarce and hard-won, including condoms.) Juan Jose appeared on May 23, 1973; Pepe says he was born to torear. When he was 8, he was written up in a bullfighting journal for having "the courage of a 30-year-old matador." When he was 12, he killed his first bull. At 21, he became the first and only man in his family to achieve the rank of professional matador.

"All of my sons were good," Pepe says. "But Juan had something special." He stares into space for a long time, as if seeking the precise descriptor for this ineffable quality.

"Huevos!" He grins. "Cojones!"

Later, as Juan Jose made his bones as a young matador, he earned a reputation for fighting the world's most difficult and aggressive bulls: Victorinos, Pablo Romeros, and especially Miuras, a strain of fighting bull notorious for maiming and killing many toreros. Padilla's style was defined by his incredible—and lunatic—valor. He did moves nobody else would dare. He was one of the few matadors to put in his own banderillas, to cape bulls on his knees. One consequence of this bravura is that Padilla might well be the record holder when it comes to bullring injuries: Before the Zaragoza goring, he had already been seriously wounded by the toros thirty-eight times. He nearly died in Pamplona in 2001, when a Miura bull gored him in the neck.

Last October in Zaragoza, Padilla's life changed forever in just a few gory seconds.

Overnight, Padilla's story flies around the globe: He's a hero in Spain, elsewhere a grotesque footnote to the "real" daily news. A Twitter sensation: #Fuerzapadilla. His shattered face becomes the public face of bullfighting.

Once the media storm dies down and his condition is stabilized, Juan travels home to the seaside pueblo of Sanlucar, where he lives with Lidia and their two children, Paloma, 8, and Martin, 6. At home, he is left to relearn kindergarten skills in private, miles from any bullring. How to chew and swallow. How to ride his bicycle and grocery shop, cycloptically. The ringing in his left ear never stops. It hurts to talk. Unable to train for a corrida, some days he can't stop crying. Prior to the accident, he was a joyful, open, easygoing guy. Which is not to say that he was necessarily an even-keeler. He has always had a strong character, just like the noble bulls he fights, Pepe explains, "because of his raza," his fiery lineage. Juan Jose can be tempestuous, irritable, "and then there's nothing to be done, you have to leave him alone!"

But the mood that sucks him under in October is something new. Like the eye he can't open, it's black and unchanging.

Lidia is not used to seeing her husband ashamed, in pain. "We were so afraid for him—the children, too, it affected them...."

Lidia Padilla is a sedately beautiful woman, dark-haired, with a doll's porcelain face, and she's been Juan Jose's girl since antes antes, cradle-robbed when she was 14 and he was a high school senior, the handsome bread-delivery boy. Their first date was during Semana Santa, an Easter festival. Juan Jose believed it was his destiny to have a wife like Lidia, a woman both "passionate" and devoutly Catholic. "I found the balance I needed in her," he says.

Lidia has been with Juan his whole career, but she has never once watched her husband perform. Not in a plaza and not on TV, and during the eleven-hour drive to Zaragoza, after the accident, she imagined begging him to retire. But when she saw him in the hospital, the speech she'd prepared dissolved. "I couldn't take that dream from him," she says. "To ask him not to be a torero. It would be like killing him while he was still alive."

Padilla realizes he needs to get back into the bullring as soon as humanly possible. So many people had suffered as a result of his accident, he says, that he wanted to give them "tranquillity, normalcy." He has a habit of describing his "return to normalcy" as something he has to do for other people, as if the Zaragoza fall upset some cosmic equilibrium, knocked the whole world (and not just his world) off its axis.

But what's the rush to resume a career that nearly killed him? Why the sprint back to such a chronically risky kind of normal?

"I couldn't conceive of my life without el toreo," he says. "If I couldn't have returned to my profession, it's clear that I would have been really affected. I could have dedicated myself to other things, business. I had some good offers, but none of that was going to fill me.... Oh, it was affecting my head, I felt such a heaviness, at the beginning I was anguished, it was a tremendous anguish."

In the bullfighting world, there is this saying, Torear la suerte: an aphorism that contains an entire philosophy. Brutishly translated: "Bullfight your fate." Whatever bull God drums up for you, you face off against, you dance with, you dominate, and it's up to you to put on a splendid show, to use every bull as an opportunity to demonstrate all of your arte. Your valor and skill. Torear la suerte, in other words, combines religious fatalism with Nietzchean will.

Padilla's years as a torero, then, have prepared him to view his recovery as a special kind of corrida—a chance to use his faith and courage outside the bullring.

···

In late October, Padilla travels north to Oviedo to consult with an internationally renowned ophthalmic surgeon, who warns him that his comeback plan seems "unrealistic"—his optic nerve is still not responding to light. The next specialist to evaluate Padilla is Alberto Garcia-Perla, a maxillofacial surgeon. As Padilla recalls their first meeting, his voice grows rough with gratitude: "There was never a moment when Dr. Garcia-Perla responded negatively to my dream of returning to torear. He's always said that I would be the one to decide."

Garcia-Perla, the chief surgeon at Seville's Virgen del Rocio Hospital, will direct a team of eighteen doctors, including plastic surgeons, ear-nose-and-throat surgeons, and an anesthesiologist, in an attempt to repair Padilla's facial nerve. The plan is to reconnect the two ends of the nerve using an implant from the sural nerve in Padilla's leg. If the operation succeeds, Juan might regain the ability to blink and chew, lift both brows in surprise. Garcia-Perla is no stranger to this kind of high-stakes reconstructive surgery; his team successfully performed the second face-transplant surgery in Spain, the eleventh in the world. But they've never had a case quite like Padilla's.

"We've seen facial trauma like Juan's before. What's unique here is the method: the horn of a bull. Ordinarily a goring of that depth to the face...it could have killed him." Think how narrowly he avoided brain damage, says Garcia-Perla. "It was a question of millimeters. He's lucky to be alive, and he's conscious of that."

The surgery gets under way at 9 a.m. on November 22. It lasts fourteen hours. Moonrise, and Juan Padilla has a new face. And within weeks, the repaired facial nerve begins to "awaken." Little by little, Padilla regains limited motor control of his left eyebrow and lips. Over the next six months, Garcia-Perla believes, Padilla might recover as much as 80 percent of his facial mobility. But nerve regeneration is a slow process. One millimeter, more or less, per day.

On December 30, five weeks after his epic operation, Padilla stands in front of a vaca brava, a 2-year-old cow, at Fuente Ymbro, a ranch in Cadiz that breeds fighting bulls. He's here to torear with a live animal for the first time since the accident. The day is cold and cloudless. Scallion green hills descend to an azure lake, and bulls that look camel-humped with muscle tissue percolate slowly around the low buildings. A dozen close friends and family members are standing around the miniature bullring, waiting to see what Juan Jose is capable of in his reconstructed body. It's a "closed-doors corrida"—a test and a performance.

With his eye patch in place, he shakes out the muleta, his red cape, and shouts: "Toro!" Everybody's eyes are full. Only the young cow, with her velvety, bumblebee-like ruff, seems distracted, unaware of the import of this moment. She charges Juan's blind side, and he expertly sidesteps her.

Padilla insisted on this date because he refused to let the year end without "the sensation of dressing as a bullfighter" and standing before an animal. He describes his desire to "grab the cape" in supple, tactile terms, with the longing of a ghost recalling its body. "And above all I wanted to share it, to offer it as a gift to my family and those close to me who suffered through this, to the doctors. Afterward I realized that I hadn't been wrong, to have this hope of returning."

Juan Jose Padilla at home with his 6-year-old son, Martin, his daughter, Paloma, 8, and his wife, Lidia.

In January the surgeon in Oviedo, the skeptic, examines Padilla and is so impressed by the adaptation of his right eye that he revises his initial prognosis: Padilla is able to measure distances and spaces with only one eye, and so it's "perfectly fine" for him to return to the bullring. Garcia-Perla, who attended the private corrida on the thirtieth, agrees.

So on March 4, in the southwestern town of Olivenza, the Cyclone reappeared, looking like a glittering apparition of his former self, haunting the afternoon, wearing a black eye patch and a laurel green suit of lights. Olivenza is not a major venue on the calendar taurino, but Juan Jose's one-eyed return magnetized the world's gaze. In the moments before his first bull came rampaging onto the sand, nobody knew what to expect: Were they about to watch a man's suicide, a second goring? How much could he really see? Wasn't it just yesterday, practically, that his face was torn apart in Zaragoza? Journalists flinched preemptively, prepared for a literal collision between the man's blind ambition and the sprinting animal. But Padilla swept his cape over the bulls' horns a dozen times, as if he were intent on violently, defiantly erasing every doubt.

···

III. Homecoming

At eight thirty every weekday morning, Juan Jose Padilla drives from his home in Sanlucar to meet with a physical therapist. For thirty minutes, he endures an electroshock treatment that causes his face to convulse and contort. This is ercise for his paralyzed facial muscles, a daily attempt to coax that nerve to regenerate. He also meets with his speech therapist and his ear doctor. Mornings are for doctors' visits, afternoons for the bulls.

At noon, Padilla drives his white Mercedes to the Sanlucar Plaza de Toros, a small, intimate bullring. "My office," he jokes. Walking through the archway feels like entering a seashell, scrubbed clean by years of sand and salt and light. Today, a Thursday in early May, the audience is me, my translator, and Diego's strawberry blond dog, Geto.

What does training look like for a bullfighter?

Padilla strides into the ring, skeletally gaunt in a T-shirt and black bike leggings. An athlete, no question, but with a mauled look. Wild and fragile at once. He's dropped forty pounds since Zaragoza. He's average height, but his extreme weight loss makes him look like a gangly giant; his large hands dangle from his wrists, and his Adam's apple tents his long throat. If Goya were to paint a taurino trading card, it would look like Juan Jose.

"Toro!" Padilla screams at Diego, furiously wagging his red cape.

Diego lowers his head and runs at him.

Diego Robles is 60-plus and leather-skinned, so super-marrón he seems to be getting tan from within, as if at any moment he might hiccup a tiny sun. He's an ex-torero with startlingly blue eyes, and he'll grab his jerky-lean stomach muscles to show you he has no "Michelins"—nary a spare tire.

Diego adjusts his backward powder blue baseball cap, paws the sand with a sneaker toe, and charges again. He runs with his head down, holding a pair of real bull's horns that look like yellowed saber teeth. He circles Padilla, huffing in an unconvincing imitation of a deranged bull. Padilla holds his body erect, drawing the cape over Diego's head with animatronic evenness.

Next, Diego disappears from the plaza and returns with what appears to be a Tim Burton movie prop—a wheelbarrow with a bull's skull affid to its front end. The skull's a little crooked, which makes its grin look somehow bashful. A hay bale is lashed to the cart behind it, frizzing golden straw.

"What do bullfighters call that wheelbarrow?" I ask, preparing for a whimsical yet terrifying new vocabulary word.

"The wheelbarrow," says Diego, looking flustered. Geto greets the skull in cosmopolitan fashion, licking first one bony cheek and then the other.

The skull-barrow rolls my way.

"Grip the horns," says Diego. They're a foot long at least, thicker around than my wrist. It's a sickening ercise to imagine this bovine stalagmite tunneling through Padilla's eye socket.

Now Padilla practices the volapié—a death blow delivered to the bull by an airborne matador. He runs at the wheelbarrow, leaps over the skull's horns, and sinks his estoque, the needle-like sword, into the center of the hay bale. "Bien!" claps Diego. The hay bale looks like a cheese cube at the end of a gigantic toothpick. The skull grins vacantly into the stands; Geto, bored, has wandered off to lick his own foot.

To a foreigner, it's an almost comically surreal scene. "Toro!" Padilla screams into the empty ring.

···

Every May for nineteen years, Padilla has returned to his hometown of Jerez de la Frontera, a thirty-minute drive from Sanlucar, to torear at Jerez's annual fair.

My twentieth Feria.

In Spain, every locality from Madrid to the most rinky-dink pueblecito celebrates its annual fair: a big weeklong street party, usually tied to a religious holiday. Portable tents go up like luminous mushrooms; inside these temporary pavilions, everybody boozes and shimmies. Jerez de la Frontera, the fifth-largest city in Andalucía, is located in Cadiz province. Halfway between the sea and the blue burrs of the mountains, it's the true cradle of what Americans consider to be stereotypically Español: sherry, stallions, flamenco, fighting bulls. The Jerez Feria is one of the major events on the bullfighting calendar, this year even more than usual. Padilla's canted face is on posters everywhere in town; he's wearing the laurel green jacket, extending his montera. On the posters his snarl looks stagy and flirtatious, deliberate; in person, you can see that this grimace is frozen onto him, a half smile he can't straighten.

It's Saturday, May 12, and I've been invited to Padilla's house about an hour before he'll leave for the corrida in Jerez. The Padilla homestead turns out to be a Sanlucar monument. Kids on bikes don't know the street address, but when I say "Padilla" their eyes go wide—"Ah! The house of the torero." Sanlucar and Jerez are not wealthy towns—Sanlucar has one of the lowest per capita incomes in Spain—so bullfighting can be something analogous to Hoop Dreams for the poor kids of Andalucía.

The house is a modest mansion surrounded by an eight-foot magenta wall, with a massive backyard that hosts a lemon tree and a bluish tile of Christ's face. There's a play area for Paloma and Martin, and a sandy junior bullring where their dad trains. The interior of the two-story house is set up like a self-curated museum: Every room contains displays of bullfighting memorabilia. Swords, hats, and so many sequined jackets that you wonder if there's not a naked army of Prince's backup dancers wandering around Sanlucar.

The accident, in career terms, has been a remarkable boon. Padilla has contracts everywhere—this season, he is planning to perform in sixty to seventy corridas. Diego can negotiate for fees that are double or in some cases triple what he was making before. He's also getting better bulls: "The people have always associated me with Miuras," Padilla says. "Now there's been a complete change in my professional life. They're giving me new opportunities." For the first time, he's facing off against the best-bred bulls in Spain. Stylistically, he explains, a different choreography is possible with a toro that charges rhythmically and follows the cape.

Half a dozen close family friends, including Dr. Garcia-Perla, are gathered around the coffee table, waiting for their audience with the Cyclone. (The title of the Padillas' lone coffee-table book: The Cyclone.) A papal hush drapes the house. Somehow, thanks to the mysterious intervention of Diego, I am admitted to Juan Jose's dressing room. In the inner chamber, Padilla is putting on a short, rigid jacket, the matador's exoskeleton. It's snowflake white with gold embroidery. He's wearing the matador's coleta, a clip-on bun made of his own hair. He's already got on the cropped breeches, the flamingo pink socks. After his weight loss last fall, he needed a whole new wardrobe.

He says he has around fifty suits, but only eight in rotation for any given season. The sword boy cleans them after each corrida. Padilla's sword "boy" is a kind, bespectacled man in his fifties named Juan Muñoz. He dresses and undresses Juan Jose and hands him his sword at the "hour of truth" and is perhaps the most feudal-manservant-seeming member of Team Padilla. Muñoz doesn't use OxiClean or Shout—no, nothing like that. He says he gets the blood off his boss's sequins with soap and water.

Padilla adjusts his skinny tie in the mirror. He smiles nervously at Lidia, who smiles back. Strides out to greet his fan base.

"How do I look?"

Spotlit by the risk that he's about to undertake in the plaza, Juan looks frailer than he has all week. Mummy-like in white. His legs are matchsticks. His eye patch is a blindfold he can't lift. Suddenly I feel very scared, truly scared, for this corrida.

"Very handsome!" everyone responds. People hug Padilla one by one and file out to their cars. We leave Lidia behind in the foyer.

···

The next time Juan Jose Padilla appears, he is a completely different person.

The plaza is crammed solid with Jerezanos. It's 7 p.m., but the enormous, cheerfully brutal sol of Andalucía is still shining above the bullring. Every matador on today's lineup is a star—Cayetano, in fact, is the scion of the Ordoñez bullfighting dynasty, and Morante de la Puebla is a legendary artist with the cape. But Padilla is the major attraction, hero and homeboy to all.

"Jerez, it's his tierra," says Diego. "It's going to be an incredibly emotional moment. You have to be strong so that so much emotion doesn't overwhelm you. It can make you tender, weak..."

Acute excitement pulses in the stands. Two nights ago, at the Thursday corrida, this same plaza was nearly empty. Everybody blamed the economy: Even the cheap seats cost twenty-eight euros. But tonight there is no evidence that money is weighing on anybody's mind. FUERZAPADILLA! read banners unscrolling throughout the stadium.

When Padilla, Cayetano, and Morante parade onto the sand, a roar erupts from the open mouth of the stadium into the blue sky of Jerez, loud enough to ripple a flock of low-flying birds. In the foyer of his home, Padilla looked so thin, like something prematurely sprung from its cocoon. But now he is fast, strong; the eye patch looks menacing. His hoarse cry of "Jerez!" brings down the house.

Padilla's first bull comes charging out and silences the rowdy crowd. In a corrida de toros, the matador will have roughly twenty minutes to dominate and kill the bull. This block of time is subdivided into three tercios: "the act of the lances," "the act of the banderillas," and "the act of death." If the matador performs well, the crowd will petition the president of the bullfight to award him trophies: the dead bull's ears or, for an exceptional corrida, the gristly gray ribbon of the bull's tail. Death is always the outcome for the bull, except in rare cases when an unusually "valiant" animal is pardoned.

Many have pointed out that the bullfight is not really a fight at all—a contest between equals—but "a tragedy in three acts." The rite's brutality can make bullfighting feel incomprehensible to a foreigner and indefensible to an animal lover; and yet every bullfighter I spoke to professed to feel what struck me as a genuine love for the toros. What kind of love is this? How is it possible to publicly kill the animal to which you have dedicated all your waking hours? "I give the toro everything, and he gives me everything," Padilla told me. His profession, he says proudly, is "the most dignified in the world" because of "its truth, its reality"—its blood red engagement with the fate shared by all species. Every corrida, the matador greets his future death cloaked in fur, and today is no exception.

Act I: Juan Jose and his banderilleros swing their pink capotes around wildly, each man caping the bull in turn. Out trot the picadors, looking like dapper Lego men on horseback in their wide-brimmed hats and squarish leg armor. Their horses are swaddled in petos, mattress-like cloaks to protect them from the bulls' horns. The picadors insert their lances into the hump of muscle tissue at the base of the neck, the morillo, to get the bull to lower its head; otherwise Padilla won't be able to get over its horns to make the final kill. There is something scarily perfunctory about the way the picadors jab the bull with their long lances—they're like a cavalry of gas jockeys, only instead of filling up the tank, they are draining the bull's life.

Act II: Padilla dismisses his assistants, signals to the crowd that he will put in his own banderillas. Goddamnit, Padilla, qué fuerte. Everyone is aware that this is exactly how he lost his eye. And now, one-eyed, Padilla is flying onto the wooden running boards behind the bull. How does he get so high? He takes a running leap as if the sand were a trampoline and sinks another wooden flag into the bull. He places the final pair of banderillas al violín, a one-handed maneuver that recalls the dramatic acrobatics that caused his fall in Zaragoza.

Act III: Tercio de la muerte. Now Padilla is stalking the bull, with an unexpected sultriness and mock haughtiness. Via a sort of feline strut across the sand toward the animal, he slinks up to the bull and goads it into charging. It lowers its horns, tosses its head in a dozen vain attempts to catch the cape. When it comes up on Padilla's blind left side, we recoil, but we don't have to worry; he seems to have no trouble gauging distance or responding to the unhinged shadows in the bullring.

Padilla's body language changes tone continually over the next seven minutes, as his pasos transmit contempt and urgency, comedy and reverence. Sometimes the bullfight looks a lot like a game of freeze tag, and his pranks get juvenile; he does everything short of blowing a raspberry at the bull. Sometimes it's more like an awkward cocktail party: the bull refusing to charge, Padilla doing the torero catcall that is like emphatic forced laughter: "Eh, toro! He-he-HEH!"

Soon everyone can tell from the bull's ragged breathing that the end is near. Padilla and the bull are staring into each other's faces with an opaque intimacy. Something visible to everyone in the stands, but as ultimately impenetrable as any couple's love-or-hate affair. It's almost sunset now; the planks of blood down the bull's back look violet. As if on the conductor's cue, two seagulls choose this moment to swoop through the invisible membrane between bull and man. Padilla's dark hair is sticking to his head. The matador, underweight, with his twisted face and his eye patch, appears unmistakably mortal. His face fossilizes his brush with death, the way that fire gets incarnated by cold, tender welts. His return to the ring, one could argue, gives the crowd a sense that death will come for all of us, sooner or later, that death is certainly imminent, but it ain't here yet.

Inside the plaza's walls, the concrete parentheses that enclose Padilla and the bull, everybody straightens; erguirse is the Spanish verb for this, electric shivers racing up spines. Juan Jose directs the creature's horns around his waist, as if he is carving his own hips out of black space. Drawing beautiful shapes with the cape and the bull. Drawing breaths.

Padilla squares his feet, positions himself for the kill. The bull is four feet away from him. Here it comes: the "hour of truth." It's a crazy, horrible, ugly, enraging, senseless, sublime, endless moment to witness—a moment that swallows every adjective you want to hurl at it.

In the balcony, the orchestra has stopped playing. The conductor is craning over his shoulder, watching Padilla for his cue. His baton trembles in midair at the exact angle as Padilla's sword.

Padilla draws the sword back at eye level, as if the estoque is an arrow in an invisible quiver.

He runs. He flies, just as he did during his training with the wheelbarrow. Volapié. He leaps and leans his torso over the bull's lowered horns and plunges the sword into the vulnerable morillo.

The crowd lets out one single, tidal exhalation.

Did he "win"? Bullfighting is less straightforward than American spectacles like pro football; in this regard, it's a little more like American Idol. But thanks to the thunderous petition of the crowd, tonight the president awards him two ears from his first bull and two ears from his second. Before he exits the arena, Padilla drops onto his knees and kisses the sand of Jerez. Then he is carried through the great doors of his home plaza, de hombros, twinkling like a living torch on his brother Jaime's shoulders. Escorted by the longest ovation you have ever heard.

···

Forty minutes after his triumphant exit through the Puerta Grande, Padilla is back home in Sanlucar, changing out of his work clothes. Outside, a few guys are loading up the shuttle bus; at 4:30 a.m. tomorrow, Padilla and his entourage will leave for their next fight in Talavera. Some freckly taurine roadie carries swords and a bleached skull to the trunk.

Where is the wild torero afterparty? Lidia and the family friends are having a quiet dinner. Paloma is bouncing around, getting ready for bed. The Cyclone of Jerez emerges from his dressing room as Juan Jose, wearing a suit jacket and spiffy loafers.

"Four ears, Paloma!" he crows to his daughter, sinking into his armchair. ("The kids are always begging him, 'Papi, bring me two ears!'—you know the typical things," Lidia explains.) He smooches her to make her giggle.

How does he feel about tonight's corrida?

"This was one of the afternoons of maximum responsibility in my life," he says. "To be able to dress in my suit of lights in this new phase of my life, in front of my countrymen, my doctors, my family—" He smiles. For the past week, he explains, he's been terrified that it would be "an empty afternoon, a sad afternoon, that the bulls wouldn't help me..." That he would fail to achieve his dream of leaving de hombros, piggybacking on his brother's shoulders through the great gates.

"Well, I think it was a triumphant afternoon. I dedicate it to toda mi tierra."

Is it uncomfortable to get sedimented into legend while you are still alive? Is it like another sort of paralysis?

"I feel supremely content, proud, for all that the bull has given me, all that it's added to my life, personal as well as professional. I can't complain or feel victimized by my injury; this is the profession I chose. And this accident of mine, my recovery, I think it's touched the whole world...." He leans forward, his enormous hands cupping his bony knees, shaping his words carefully. "There was a time when I couldn't show my face, when my head was a little screwed up. But now I've entered a period of great pride, great happiness."

His working eye follows his daughter, who is babbling some song under the taxidermied heads of six Miura bulls that Padilla killed in a single afternoon in Bilbao.

"And there is always a new goal tomorrow." It's the "amor por los toros," he says—his love of the bulls—that drives him.

If some of these phrases sound like Hallmark propaganda, you have to imagine them spoken by a man who is teaching himself to speak again. It's a legitimate medical miracle that Juan Jose Padilla can even vocalize his "love for the toros" today. Tomorrow he'll fight three horned beasts in Talavera; on Monday it's back to the ABCs in speech therapy. Somehow he's managed to surrender without bitterness to his new situation while simultaneously working without pause to reclaim his life. His feats in the bullring are as impressive as they've ever been, but for my money it's Padilla's daily diligence, his unglorious microsteps back from paralysis, that distinguish him as a true figura.

For all the talk of rewards and triumphs and miracles, the life of a bullfighter seems incredibly grueling, dangerous, uncertain.

Vale la pena? Is it worth it?

No, says Padilla's mother without a second's hesitation.

No, says Pepe Padilla, who during the Franco years used to ride trains and sleep under the stars to stand before a fighting bull. For the parents of a torero, "there is more pena than gloria."

Sí, says Lidia, because you see his happiness!

Sí, says Juan Jose Padilla, smiling as wide as his new face permits him, because God is giving me my recompensa. Now I see better with one eye than two.

Karen Russell's novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This is her first feature for GQ.

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